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Romney Seeks to Clarify ‘Pink Slip’ Remarks

By Ashley Parker January 9, 2012 2:33 pmJanuary 9, 2012 2:33 pm

HUDSON, N.H. — After more than a week of not taking questions from his press corps, and after two days of back-to-back comments that his campaign has scrambled to explain, Mitt Romney stepped to the microphone after an event at metal fabricating plant here Monday afternoon, and sought to clarify remarks he has made about fearing the “pink slip” in his private sector career, as well as his statement earlier in the day that he likes “being able to fire” people or businesses that provide poor service.

Offering more context to his assertion at a morning Chamber of Commerce event Monday that he enjoys firing people — “I like to be able to fire people who provide services to me,” Mr. Romney said then, in Nashua, N.H. — Mr. Romney further clarified that he was referring to his belief that individuals should have the choice to get rid of insurance companies that are not providing adequate care and coverage.

“I don’t want to live in a world where we have Obamacare telling us which insurance we have to have, which doctor we can have, which hospital we go to,” he said. “I believe in the setting as I described this morning where people are able to choose their own doctor, choose their own insurance company. If they don’t like their insurance company or their provider, they can get rid of it.”

Asked for specific examples of when, in his career, Mr. Romney feared the pink slip, as he claimed on Sunday, Mr. Romney talked in general terms about the uncertainty of life in the private sector.

“I think people imagine that I came in at the top of Bain & Company, the consulting firm, or the Boston Consulting Group — I started at the bottom,” Mr. Romney said. “I came out of school and I got an entry level position like the other people that were freshly-minted M.B.A.s, and like anybody that starts at the bottom of an enterprise, you wonder, when you don’t do so well, whether you’re going to be able to hang onto your job and you wonder if the enterprise gets in trouble, you know, will you be one of those that’s laid off. That’s what’s happening around the country to a lot of people today, and it breaks your heart to see people lose their jobs. Like everybody else, everybody in the private sector knows that there’s some prospect that you might lose your job.”

But when pressed on the idea that, as a Harvard graduate and son of the former governor of Michigan, Mr. Romney’s definition of struggling might be different than that of the average American, Mr. Romney flashed angry.

“You know, if you think that I should spend my entire campaign carefully choosing how everything I say relates to people, as opposed saying my own experience and telling my own experience, then that would make me a very different person than I am,” he said, adding that understands his own experiences are “not the same as everybody else.”

“If they want President Obama and a loss of 2 million jobs, a decline of median income in America by 10 percent, and people looking at very difficult prospects going forward, they can choose President Obama,” Mr. Romney continued. “But if they want someone who understands how the economy works at the level of job creation, of businesses of failing and succeeding, that’s what I can bring to the table.”

When pressed that his comments could be taken out of context — and in fact, both Democrats and Mr. Romney’s own Republican rivals have already started using the lines to attack him — Mr. Romney said that was just the nature of politics.

“Sorry, you know the context of what I was saying, which is we all like to be able to chose our own insurance company and if they don’t do the job for us being able to get rid of them and that’s what I was referring to,” he said. “I understand that in politics people are going to try and grasp at anything, take it out of context and make it something it’s not, and by the way, that’s the nature of the process.”

He concluded: “I’ve got to be an adult about it and recognize it goes with the territory.”

Still, he said, he was surprised to hear some of the attacks on his time at Bain Capital coming from Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House.

“I thought it was going to come from the president, from the Democrats, from the left, but instead it’s coming from Speaker Gingrich and apparently others,” he said.”I’m not worried about that. I’ve got broad shoulders.”

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